The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(7)

In the end it took the Wus less time than they expected to pull off their Interdependency scheme—within ten years the other families and companies were in line with their monopolies and promised noble titles, the paid-for politicians and intellectuals made their case, and the Prophet Rachela and her rapidly expanding Interdependent Church mopped up most of the rest of the public. There were holdouts and stragglers and rebellions that would go on for decades, but by and large the Wus had correctly picked their time, their moment, and their goal. And for the troublemakers, they had already decided that the planet called End, the human outpost in the newly imagined Interdependency that took the longest to get to, and to get back from, and had only a single Flow shoal in and out, would be the official dumping ground for anyone who got in their way.

Rachela, already the public and spiritual face of the Interdependency, was selected by (carefully orchestrated) acclamation as the first “emperox.” This new gender-neutral title had been chosen because market testing showed that it appealed to nearly all market segments as a fresh, new, and friendly spin on “emperor.”

This compact and highly elided history of the formation of the Interdependency may make it appear as if no one questioned the lie—that billions of people uncritically swallowed the fiction of Rachela’s prophecies. This was not at all accurate. People did question the lie, to the same amount as they would question any bit of pop spirituality marching toward an actual religion, and became alarmed as it gained acceptance, and followers, and respectability. Nor were observers of the time blind to the machinations of the Wu family as it made its play for imperial power. It was the focus of many handwringing editorials, news shows and occasionally attempted legislative action.

What the Wu family had over them was organization, and money, and allies in the form of the other now-noble families. The formation of the Holy Empire of the Interdependent States and Mercantile Guilds was a charging musk ox, and the skeptical observers were a cloud of gnats. Neither did much damage to the other, and in the end there was an empire.

One other reason the lie worked is that once the Interdependency formed, the Prophet-Emperox Rachela declared her visions and prophecies had largely come to an end, for now. She devolved all functional power in the administration of the Interdependent Church to the archbishop of Xi’an and a committee of bishops, who knew a good deal when they saw one. They rapidly built an organization that shoved the explicitly spiritual aspect of the church to the side, to be the spice of the new religion, not its main course.

In other words, neither Rachela nor the church overplayed its spiritual hand in the critical early years of the Interdepen dency, when the empire was necessarily at its most fragile. Rachela’s imperial successors, none of whom added the “prophet” part of the title to their address, largely followed her example, staying out of church business except for the most ceremonial parts, both to the relief, and then as the centuries passed, to the expectation, of the church itself.

The lie of Rachela’s visions and prophecy was never acknowledged by the church, of course. Why should it have been? To begin, neither Rachela nor the Wu family ever explicitly said outside of family conferences that the spiritual side of the Interdependent Church was wholly concocted. One could not expect Rachela’s successors, either as emperox or in the church, to own up to it, or even to publicly air their own suspicions and undermine their own authority. After that it was simply a matter of waiting until the visions and prophecy became doctrine.

For another thing, Rachela’s visions and prophecies largely came true. This was a testament to the fact that the “prophecy” of the Interdependency, while expansive, was also practically achievable, if one had ambition, money, and a certain amount of ruthlessness, all of which the Wu family had, in bulk. Rachela’s prophecies did not ask people to change the way they lived, in the small-bore, everyday sense. It just asked them to swap out their system of governance, so that those at the very very top could have even more power, control and money than they had before. As it turned out, this was not too much to ask.

Finally, as it happened, the Wu family wasn’t wrong. Humanity was widely dispersed, and of all the star systems that the Flow was known to touch, only one of them had a planet capable of sustaining human life in the open: End. All the humans in all the other systems lived in habitats on planets, moons, or floating in space, all monstrously vulnerable in their isolation, none of them entirely able to produce the raw materials needed for their existence or to manufacture all they would need to survive. Humanity needed interdependence to survive.

Whether it needed the Interdependency as the political, social and religious structure to implement that interdependence was highly questionable but, a millennium on, a moot point. The Wu family had envisioned a path to long-term, sustainable political and social power for itself and took it, using a lie as a tool to get everybody else to go along. Incidentally, the Wus also created a system under which most humans could have a comfortable life without the existential fear of isolation, entropy, the inevitable horrifying collapse of society and the death of everyone and everything they hold dear hanging over their heads every moment of every day.

The lie worked out for everyone, more or less. It was awesome for the Wus, pretty great for the rest of the noble class, and generally perfectly okay for most other folks. When a lie has negative consequences, people dislike it. But otherwise? They move on, and eventually the lie as a lie is forgotten, or in this case, codified as the foundation of religious practice and buffed and sanded into something prettier and more congenial.